Artikler af Hal Draper / Articles by Hal Draper

The myth of Lenin’s ‘Concept of the Party’: or what they did to ‘What is to be done’? (nr.4, sommer 1999, s.187-213)
The myth of today is an axiom of what we might call Leninology – a branch of Kremlinology that has rapidly grown in the hands of the various university Russian Institutes, doctoral programs, political journalists, et al. According to this axiom, Lenin’s 1902 book What is to be done? represents the essential content of his ‘operational code’ or ‘concept of the party’; all of Bolshevism and eventually Stalinism lies in ambush in its pages …”. Artiklen findes online på Marxists Internet Archive.
Se også Mike Jones kommentar: Rosa Luxemburg on Lenin’s concept of the party (What Next! nr.13, 1999).

International Socialism

Marx and Engels on womens liberation (nr.44, juli-aug. 1970, s.20-29)
“The aim of this [article] is simply to present what [Marx and Engels] really had to say on the question, as against some of the less-than-knowledgeable summaries that have seen the light recently”.

The two souls of socialism (nr.11, vinter 1962, s.12-20)

The inevitability of socialism (nr.15, vinter 1963-64, s.21-28).

International Socialist Review

Marx, Engels, and Self-emancipation, Part 1-2 (nr.53, maj-juni + nr.54, juli-aug. 2007)
“Reprint of a classic article [from 1971] on the genesis of Marx and Engels’ concept of working-class socialism from below.”

Who’s going to be the lesser-evil in 1968? (nr.32, nov.-dec. 2003)
“The point is that it is the question which is a disaster, not the answer. In setups where the choice is between one capitalist politician and another, the defeat comes in accepting the limitation to this choice”.
First udgivet af Independent Socialist, jan.-feb. 1967.

Marx Myths & Legends

The ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’ in Marx and Engels (1987)
“‘Dictatorship of the proletariat’ has been used to label Marx as an enemy of democracy. In this article, Hal Draper demonstrates that not only Marx, but also the conservatives of his time, identified the most thoroughgoing democracy as a ‘dictatorship’ – i.e., dictatorship of the people over the propertied classes. Draper shows how the meaning of the word ‘dictatorship’ changed over the decades, eventually coming to be seen as a form of government antithetical to democracy, and how via Plekhanov, ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ came to be understood in this way in Russia.”

Marx and the Economic-Jew Stereotype (1977)
“The legend according to which Marx was an anti-Semite swings on the projection of the late-twentieth century understanding of ‘political correctness’ onto 19th century writing, and in particular on Marx’s review of Bruno Bauer’s article ‘On the Jewish Question’. The work has been circulated in grossly edited form by right-wingers with the specific aim of slandering Marx’s character. In fact the article is a defence of the civil rights of Jews, as well as being a profound study of the relation between social and political rights in bourgeois society more generally.”

The Two Souls of Socialism (årg.3, nr.9, sommer 1990, s.129-156)
“The following pages propose to investigate the meaning of socialism historically; in a new way. There have always been different ‘kinds of socialism’, and they have customarily been divided into reformist or revolutionary, peaceful or violent, democratic or authoritarian, etc. These divisions exist, but the underlying division is something else. Throughout the history of socialist movement and ideas, the fundamental divide is between Socialism-From-Above and Socialism-From-Below.”
Tidligere bragt i New Politics (årg.5, nr.1, vinter 1966, s.57-84), samt i en tidligere kortere udgave i International Socialism (nr.11, vinter 1962, s.12-20). Online på Marxists Internet Archive. Se også norsk udgave: Sosialismens to sjeler

A note on the father of Anarchism (årg.8, nr.1, vinter 1969, s.79-93)
“The myth of ‘Libertarianism’ rides again, as George Woodcock celebrates the Notebooks left by Proudhon, the ‘father of anarchism’ … the Notebooks contain the most massive evidence we have that this rhetorician of liberty was one of the most authoritarian and anti-democratic minds of the 19th century”.

Marx and the dictatorship of the proletariat (årg.1, nr.4, sommer 1962, s.91-104)
“This study deals with the origin and history of the phrase ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ in Marx and Engels. It asks: What did this term mean to them?”

Socialist Register

Marxist women versus bourgeois feminism. With Anne G. Lipow (1976, s.179-226)
“The texts presented here are intended to revive acquaintance with a revolutionary women’s movement which was undoubtedly the most important one of the kind that has yet been seen. Yet it has been so thoroughly dropped down in the memory hole that even mention of its existence is hard to find”.
Also online at Marxists Internet Archive.

Marx on democratic forms of government (1974, s.101-124)
“This is one chapter in a work on Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution which will be published in the near future: Many questions connected with the subject of this chapter and which are only briefly mentioned here are of course discussed in detail in other parts of the work. In general way, Marx’s socialism (communism) as a political programme may be most quickly defined, from the Marxist standpoint, as the complete democratization of society”.
Also online at Marxists Internet Archive.

The principle of self-emancipation in Marx and Engels (1971, s.81-109)
“There can be little doubt that Marx and Engels would have agreed with Lenin’s nutshell definition of Marxism as ‘the theory and practice of the proletarian revolution’. In this violently compressed formula, the key component is not the unity of theory and practice; unfortunately that has become an ambiguity. The key is the word ‘proletarian’ – the class-character component.”

The death of the state in Marx and Engels (1970, s.281-307)
“The aim of this essays is to survey the thinking of Marx and Engels on the ‘dying-away’ of the state in socialist (communist) society. By passing in review what they wrote on the subject, to the extent practical without getting into ramifying issues, we will also consider how their understanding of the question developed through three fairly distinct periods.”

Solidarity

An eye-witness account of the Russian Revolution (3/104, 10. jan. 2007)
“The following discussion by the American Marxist scholar Hal Draper, is of a book written by a non-Bolshevik member of the government that took power in October 1917, I N Steinberg. Steinberg’s book, In the Workshop of the Revolution, published in 1954 long after he left Russia, has long-been important source material for histories of the revolution.”

What Next?

The ABC of the national liberation movements (nr.13, 1999)
“This article is part of a document, written in the aftermath of the 1968 Tet offensive in Vietnam, which was intended as a political discussion guide for members of the Independent Socialist Club of Berkeley. The second half of the document, which deals specifically with Vietnam, has been omitted for reasons of space, as has Draper’s introduction”. Artiklen er også online på Marxists Internet Archive.

The myth of Lenin’s ‘Concept of the Party’, or: what they did to ‘What is to be done’? (nr.12, 1999)
“The myth of today is an axiom of what we might call Leninology – a branch of Kremlinology that has rapidly grown in the hands of the various university Russian Institutes, doctoral programs, political journalists, et al. According to this axiom, Lenin’s 1902 book What is to be done? represents the essential content of his ‘operational code’ or ‘concept of the party’; all of Bolshevism and eventually Stalinism lies in ambush in its pages …”. Artiklen findes også på Marxists Internet Archive + i tidsskriftet Historical Materialism (nr.4, summer 1999, s.187-213). Se også Mike Jones kommentar: Rosa Luxemburg on Lenin’s concept of the party (What Next, nr.13, 1999)

An open letter to Ignazio Silone (1956) (3/7, okt. 2006)
“We are here raising only the question: Why have you abandoned the ideas of Third Camp internationalism, as you explained them in your brilliant 1939 interview reprinted elsewhere in these pages? and why have you become a critical supporter one of the war blocs?”

Old empire against new: Marxist and the 1904-5 Russo-Japanese war (pdf) (nr.3, dec. 2002, s.131-140)
“The mass, united, Marxist-educated socialist movement of the decades before 1914 created a political culture largely lost in the late 20th century through the depredations of Stalinism and reformism … A persistent bias was to believe that to assess one pole in a conflict as more ‘progressive’ as another mandated political support for the ‘progressive’ pole”.

Marx and Engels on war (nr.2, marts 2002, s.136-142)
“Marx and Engels commented on many conflicts and wars between the great powers of 19th century Europe. In this article Hal Draper demonstrates that their political attitude towards those conflicts was consistently based on advancing, not whichever of the established five great powers seemed the ‘lesser evil’ or more progressive, but … the workers revolution”.

Lenin and the myth of revolutionary defeatism + Part 2: After Lenin: the revival and reinterpretation (nr.1, sept. 2001, s.84-110)
“As Lenin himself saw the problems of theory and political policy, his historical role in the socialist movement was to revive and revive and reanimate the revolutionary substance of Marxism that had been overlaid by the creeping social-reformism of the Second International. In respect to anti-war policy, however, he – along with Luxemburg and the whole left – had to do more than to revive. They had to readapt Marxism and its policies to the reality of a new epoch”.

Anatomy of the Rizzi myth (nr.57, sept. 1999, s.29-31)

Sean Matgamna: Introduction to Hal Draper on Bruno Rizzi (nr.57, sept. 1999, s.27-28)
“Bruno Rizzi … is still spoken of as either the originator or best representative, or both, of the view that Stalinist USSR was a new socio-economic formation, not capitalist, but ‘bureaucratic collectivist'”.

A matter of terminological taste (nr.49, sept. 1998, s.43)
“The author … believes that the best theoretical description of the of the Stalinist system is ‘bureaucratic state capitalism’, and we will have to say a word about his handling of this state-capitalist theory; but his political conclusions are very close, if not identical with those of Indenpendent Socialism”. Anmeldelse af Tony Cliff’s bog: Stalinist Russia (1955)